Under the Tuscan Sun
by sundry
Summary: Taichi is restless, Yomato is thoughtful, and falling in love is easy under the Tuscan sun.
1. Chapter 1

Taichi is asleep on your shoulder.

He had fallen asleep on the three hour car-ride into the deep Tuscan countryside despite the rough, unpaved road and lack of air conditioning. There are no seatbelts in the backseat-- you had grabbed onto him after a particularly rough lurch and he had, in his sleep, curled into your touch.

He's breathing quietly and as still as you've ever seen him, without the hot and wild sandstorm of restlessness that has been blowing around him in a constant, private wind for the past month.

It's your last summer-- before everyone leaves for different universities and different countries and different friends. But Taichi had announced, suddenly, last week, he wanted to spend the summer in Tuscany and you offered to go along.

You've driven through a deep valley, its hillsides dotted with tended vineyards and olive groves, and now the landscape has given way to toasted fields of sunflowers. The house begins to appear in the distance-- tall and square, a sun-soaked apricot-color with faded green shutters and an ancient tile roof.

Taichi lifts his head and turns to look at you with a soft, sleepy face, half-open mouth and warm eyes. It's warmth that is always there, but kept up especially for Hikari and-- at one time-- you.

He's your best friend. You're not quite sure if it began when you started dating Sora last year but he had grown quieter and quieter around you and the underlying distance in his eyes when he'd meet your gaze had grown wider and wider.

He gives you a small smile and turns to look out the window. The setting sun has painted the horizon with broad streaks of deep gold and saturated saffron and bright flares of scarlet. A slab of sunlight falls into the car from the side window so that Taichi squints when he turns to look at you. When he opens his eyes again they are-- for a brief moment-- the same color as the dust-dry plain outside and the emotion on his face makes you want to straighten and look to the sky.

The car lurches again, violently, as you drive into another deep dip in the road.

This isn't the first time you've thought about kissing Taichi, but pressed knee-to-knee with him in the hot yellow sunshine and surrounded by the ancient dust of the Tuscan plain, this is the first time you hadn't thought about stopping yourself either.


	2. Chapter 2

You wake to the hard, metallic click of the front gate closing shut. Dawn is just beginning to filter through the window shutters, and although he has left without a word, you know Taichi has gone running. You lie in bed for a long, still moment before getting up.

The cottage you two have rented for the summer has a kitchen so narrow only one person can pass through at a time but a balcony that looks southeast towards the deep valley, not a single piece of silverware but a turntable in the living and an entire crate filled with Beatles and Alison Krauss records. There's an oversized blank book lying open on kitchen counter, filled with diagrams of wildflowers and planting advice for herbs in different handwritings, faded snapshots and crinkled postcards of paintings.

You've stocked the refrigerator and pantry with fresh mozzarella and sun-ripened lettuces and local salami and baskets of thyme and oregano and air fennel greens but you turn to a recipe and wash your hands in preparation for a cold tomato soup that only requires three ingredients. There's running water because of the well underneath the house. It has yet to run dry, but Tuscany is in a serious drought, and in the late afternoon Taichi returns from the eight mile run to town with a five liter bottle of water in each hand.

You think, no matter how long you know him, Taichi will still surprise you. He's picked up Italian with surprising ease. You two know roughly the same amount of words and verb conjugations from listening to the same language audiobook during the long flight. But he's the one who declared your customs and exchanged your currency and arranged for a car service to take you to this house deep in the Tuscan countryside. There's something purer in his pronunciation, more fluid in his speech.

He had spoken with the shopkeeper while in town. The storms are supposed to come next month and take the edge off this dry, searing heat.

The shopkeeper has also given him a grape tendril to plant. You are reluctant-- the countryside is already gold underneath the hardest drought in twenty years, and you have been cautioned to clear the terrace of wild grasses to protect from fire.

But you do anyways. It's the first thing he's asked of you in months.


	3. Chapter 3

You've already settled into a pattern. Taichi goes into town twice a week to get water, and twice a week with the grocery list you've made for red peppers and garlic and fresh ricotta.

You've never disliked being alone-- not talking, not touching, just sitting or thinking or taking a long bath. You don't do any of those things while Taichi's gone though. Instead you clean-- dusting and hauling and scrubbing. The house is filled with thin spider webs stretching across the chestnut stained furniture and streaked fox mirrors; there's an entire cabinet filled with jars of marmalade, their rosy fruit color just peeking through from beneath the settled film of dust, and shelves of old novels and outdated maps of Italy and various items guests have left throughout the years. You cook-- rolling your own crust for plum tarts and frying zucchini flowers with olive then peanut and finally sunflower oil before they are golden and crispy instead of faded and limp and planning your menus around the vegetables Taichi tells you will ripen by the next market day. You didn't bring your guitar, but you've taken to pulling out your old harmonica. Sometimes you'll jot ideas for lyrics, and once you try your hand at sketching.

It's not exactly true that you don't think. There are certain things you think about a lot, and certain things you don't think about at all. The Tuscan landscape and leaving for university in the fall; the recipe you found for risotto al Barolo and Sora. You don't think about Sora, and when you do, you think about how you should think about her more and less about how you should think to think about her.

The heat that hits, dry and hot as a fist when you step outside and how, exactly, the Teenage Wolves will fit into your life; if you'll be able to coax life out of the garden and Taichi. Not talking or touching but just about him.

Taichi returns mid-afternoon and forgoes the bed and even the couch, choosing instead to lie spread-eagle on the floor for a siesta. The persistent sunshine filters through the shutters you've just closed, illuminating Taichi in slices-- his lower lip, a thin section across his stomach. You think about Taichi a lot, but you are not sure, exactly, of what your thoughts are.


	4. Chapter 4

Taichi joins a pick-up game of soccer and it's hard to tell him apart from the local boys with his tanned skin and expressive hands and loud voice. A group of girls linger by the edge of the marketplace, watching the game from beneath the shade of the faded striped canopy. Taichi has a presence on the field, a particularblend of arrogance and humility. His skills are easy and effortless, and even as he maneuvers between two players with his right foot on top of the ball in what Sora once told you was called the Zidane Spin Move it seems more like he's having fun than showing off. Two of the girls giggle, and the third with a bright turquoise necklace around her neck and bright bouquet of sunflowers in her arms turns to her head ever so slightly to look in your direction.

Afterwards, as you walk back, Taichi's talking on and off. There's an upcoming match between Real Madrid and Barcelona; the old woman who sells red terracotta ceramics says there'll be rain before the end of the month; Hikari said in her letter Mimi would be back Japan for two weeks in August and he shows you the silly stick figure drawing of the original DigiDestined she enclosed-- the orange figure still has a pair of goggles floating just above its head and the blue figure is wearing glasses and the one that is supposed to be you has the best drawn hair.

You haven't talked much with Mimi since she moved away, but you know she and Taichi stayed in touch. She mailed him every kind of peanut butter filled candy imaginable and cookies made from the different recipes she would try out and he sent her scented stationary and pastel erasers shaped like tubes of lipstick and a tin of his mom's rice cakes once as a joke. You commented on this to Takuru and Hikari once, and she had said in that simple and quiet way of hers, that they both knew what it was like to be lonely. Takeru had given you a pointed but unreadable look then, and you've never been able to bring yourself to press the subject.

Later, it's the middle of the night. The air is hot, nearing body temperature. You can't sleep, and Taichi's bed is empty. Your parents separated, and you were separated from your brother. But her words are what you think of now and you've never been so lonely.


	5. Chapter 5

The light has faded from a warm gold into an evening blue. You tend to forget the stars, living in the constant light of the city. But sitting on the stone wall of the terrace they are bright and clear above you, pulsating and falling.

The thick stone walls keep the inside of the house cool all day long but outside the air is sweltering, heavy and hot hours after the sun has set. Taichi shifts slightly, turning his head to look at you for the first time in almost an hour.

You're glad for the movement, really, when everything else around you is so static. Your mind feels peaceful and your heart feels full and your arm feels heavy as you reach out to him. He tenses, like he can't decide if he wants to move away or turn into this strange nearly forgotten half-touch. It's the empty spaces Taichi leaves-- half-filled glasses on the kitchen counter, yesterday's shirt on the floor, your paperback novel with creases on the spine so that it now opens itself to certain pages. Even as he relaxes against you he doesn't seem all here, as if there are parts of him scattered on the walk home these past few nights and pieces of him lost in the rush of these past few years. He leans his head against your shoulder but still his back is wistful, his shoulders curved with longing.

"You look tired."

"No," he says. Then, "I am."

This is the closest you have come to asking, and the closest he has come to telling. Taichi's looking at you fully now and for the briefest of seconds the two of you are hand in hand, like when you were younger. The heat from his skin makes him feel realer than real, and he smiles just like he used to before slipping his hand away.

You feel almost smothered, with the humid night air and the intensity of his gaze and the residual heat of his touch. You open your mouth to say something but the pressure is heavy on your chest and the night is big and quiet, like the space between you.


	6. Chapter 6

Taichi stops suddenly and you do too. The rain has finally come--you're still a good mile from the house and so thoroughly soaked by now that there's no real use in hurrying.

"We should go home." The sharp edges of Taichi's face are blurred soft in the rain and he's looking at you with those extraordinary eyes.

_Vipera! _You overheard the workers of the tumbled stone farm further down the road shouting to warn the others of a poisonous snake on the first walk to town.

You had just been clearing the terrace of wild grasses earlier that morning and, alarmed, you turned to him then and said the same thing.

But now the house feels like a home too, and it's hard to leave.

"Life in easy is in Tuscany," you say, and what you mean is, Falling in love with you is easy under the Tuscan sun. You loved you before this summer, but the way you love him now is with insistence and intensity. It strikes you in the face before topping the crests across the valley and doesn't go away when you try to fall asleep; it burns your shoulders as you tend the garden, the red and yellow potatoes that take care of themselves and the grape tendril that flourishes all while you feel as parched as the hills around you; it saturates the air and fills your lungs and enriches your blood and you feel it with every breath, every beat.

But there's no sun now. There's just water, water everywhere. There are droplets caught in your eyelashes, rivets running down the curves of your cheeks and it makes your mouth feel slick and cool. When you kiss it's like catching raindrops, and your fingers trickle down, one, two, three, four and then the gentler brush of a thumb down the side of his neck.

"Sora." His voice is quiet and you're so close together you feel more than see that he's shaking ever so slightly.

"It's us," you whisper when Taichi goes still and there is, for a moment, nothing in the air but rain and the weight of those words.


End file.
